A good part of the work of René Guénon is finally available in Arabic. Nine books have been published by a Jordanian publisher, عالم الكتب الحديث (Modern Books’ World). This is major news, as previously the work of Guénon seemed to have been received with interest in the Muslim world in Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, and Bosnia—but not in the Arab world.
The translations are all by Shaykh Abdul Baqi Miftah (born 1958), an Algerian scholar and shaykh. He was born in the small town of Guemar in the province of El Oued, an agricultural area, and at the age of about 15 joined the Habriyya, a branch of the Darqawiyya. After university, he taught science and mathematics in schools.
On the advice of his shaykh, Sayyid Muhammad Belkaid al-Tilimisani (1911-1998), Shaykh Abdul Baqi Miftah opened a zawiya of his own in Guemar in 1988. Shaykh Abdul Baqi studied the work of Ibn Arabi, on whom he published his first book in 1997, followed by several more. He was in correspondence with the French Ibn Arabi expert, Traditionalist, and Muslim Michel Chodkiewicz (1929-2020), whose courses on Ibn Arab in Paris were attended by a friend of his, the Moroccan scholar and Sufi (and perhaps also Traditionalist) Jaafar Kansoussi (born 1962). This is presumably how Shaykh Abdul Baqi came to know of the works of Guénon, translations of which he started publishing in 2013 (see cover image above). On at least one occasion he edited his translation to remove some of Guénon’s universalist positions, which are of course problematic from most Islamic perspectives.
PDFs of the translations are all available on the Internet Archive, at https://archive.org/details/RG-Arabic/RG%20-%20Tarbiyya-Tahaqquq/mode/2up.
It would be interesting to know more about the reception of these translations in Algeria, in Jordan, and beyond.
My thanks to BJ for bringing Shaykh Abdul Baqi’s translations to my attention.
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